Through Lines - Crossing Boundaries with Dario Robleto by Michael Metzger

Through Lines Crossing Boundaries with Dario Robleto

Michael Metzger

At the risk of being reductive, we might say that the work of transdisciplinary artist Dario Robleto is about two things: boundaries and bindings. Driven by a melancholy curiosity, Robleto employs sculpture, printmaking, video, and sound — not to mention squilla claws, stretched audiotape, cut-paper flowers, candle soot, butterflies, and fossilized whale ear bones — to probe the reaches of human knowledge. As he gazes to the edge of the observable cosmos or peers back to the earliest recordings of human heartbeats, the sweep of Robleto’s imagination is inhibited only by the hardest material constraints: the speed of light, the arrow of time, the certainty of death. He regards these boundaries with a certain defiance, and with a certain respect: the limits of the cosmos are unbearable, yet we get our bearings from them. Boundaries bind us. They may be all that binds us. At the extremes of the universe, Robleto asks, might we find genuine universality?

It’s a loaded concept, universality. In a world defined and divided by difference, what threads of being might each and every human rightfully claim? For Robleto, the search for commonality is what guides him to anchor his art in themes of death, grief, love, and memory — experiences that reflexively arise from sharing finite time and space with other thinking, feeling beings. It’s what drives his fascination with messages sent into space in search of alien intelligences — messages coded in the purportedly “universal” language of mathematics. It’s what leads him to explore the history of the heartbeat — which, in the centuries before the advent of the artificial heart, was perceived as a sine qua non of human sensation. It’s what attracts him to the work of nineteenth-century physiologists like Étienne-Jules Marey, figures who crafted ingenious devices of measurement and inscription that promised a universal, visual “language of phenomena . . . superior to all other modes of expression.”1

Figs. 1.1, 1.2 Dario Robleto, Love, before There Was Love, 2018 (details). Earliest waveform recordings of blood flowing through the heart, both before and during an emotional state (1870), rendered and 3D printed in brass-plated stainless steel; and brushed steel and glass vitrine. Each vitrine: 58 × 17 × 17 in.

The bonds between Robleto and Marey run deep. As a scientist, Marey struggled with the fallibility of human perception, seeking everfiner mechanisms of registration to directly apprehend the slightest fluctuations of matter. Capable of tracing the tremor of a pulse and the path of an insect’s wing, his novel techniques, such as the sphygmograph and the chronophotograph, represented what he called a “graphic method” of transcription. As a visual artist, Robleto practices a graphic method of a different, yet kindred sort; an inventive maker of delicate, intricate objects, he also shares the scientist’s aspiration to ever-greater sensitivity. Whether he’s addressing the most minute phenomena or the horizons of the known universe, Robleto binds the rigor of scientific inquiry with the emotional nuance of artistic expression. Straining at the bounds of observation, Robleto again discovers unity at the limits: the common endeavor of art and science to achieve a form of knowledge that language alone cannot speak.

Across his prints, sculptures, and installations, Robleto limns the emotional and philosophical consequences of scientific breakthroughs, rendering data as embodied sensation. Love, before There Was Love (figs. 1.1, 1.2), which draws on nineteenth-century pulmonary and neurological research into the materiality of emotion, is one such work. The first cardiac pulse waves ever recorded before and during an emotional state, captured in 1870, are cast here as a pair of freestanding sculptures commemorating an inner upheaval that words will always strain to capture. Here, in stark yet vivid brass-plated stainless steel forms, stands a graphic manifestation of the heart’s knowledge: the ability to race with anticipation, to throb with anguish, to ache with yearning, to interpret the outer world of sensation through muscular expression. A testament to the exquisite sensitivity of the heart — perhaps, in the end, our most perceptive organ — Love, before There Was Love also visualizes the pulse-quickening excitement of scientific discovery. Before these cardiograms, the emotional stirrings of the heart were the stuff of metaphor, surmise, and fleeting apprehension. The sculpture translates an instant of monumental discovery — that the physiological mechanisms of ineffable sensations could be observed, measured, and preserved —

into the sculptural vocabulary of volume, extension, materiality, luster, presence, and absence.

The essays in this book are united in this spirit of translation. Bringing together reflections on the art of Dario Robleto from across the disciplines of art history, media studies, anthropology, musicology, engineering, and the history of science, The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto represents an effort at binding different domains of knowledge. The contributors to this volume may not speak the same disciplinary languages, but each recognizes a common vocabulary of experience and curiosity in Robleto’s objects, articulating their fascination through historical context, comparative contemplation, and close looking and listening.

The Heart’s Knowledge concentrates on a decade of Robleto’s creative practice, from 2012 to 2022, a period marked by a deepening engagement with science, including astronomy, biomedical engineering, and exobiology, and by an ever-widening embrace of new materials and creative forms, from 3D-printed objects to films. At first glance, it might be challenging to discern the cohesion across the wild diversity of Robleto’s imagination. Do the solemn monochromatic prints of The First Time, the Heart (A Portrait of Life 1854–1913) (see pp. 68–82), reproducing heartbeats recorded more than a century ago, really come from the same hand as colorful, ornate, otherworldly sculptures like The Computer of Jupiter (see fig. 9.3)? What lingua franca unites such materially and aesthetically distinct works? Surveying Robleto’s twenty-five-year career, art historian Jennifer L. Roberts teases out these continuities in “Filaments: Sensitivity and Connection in the Work of Dario Robleto.” From Robleto’s earliest conceptual actions, through his sustained engagement with themes of war and loss, to his recent inquiries into the history of heart and brain recording, her essay celebrates the artist’s quest to refine his receptive capacity — and that of his viewers. While offering a necessary primer to the artist’s themes and methods, Roberts also sensitizes us to the richness of his work through acute attention to the depth of meaning invested in Robleto’s language and materials.

This book, like the exhibition it accompanies, arranges Robleto’s work around three linear themes, or through lines: heartbeats, wavelengths, and horizons. The first section, “Heartbeats,” concerns Robleto’s exploration of the cultural and scientific history of the human heart. Looking back to Marey and his contemporaries at the forefront of nineteenth-century cardiological research, Robleto exhumes records of heartbeats captured in soot, which become source material for multisensory encounters with forgotten lives. In “The Shape of the Heart,” Robert M. Brain argues that Robleto’s work conjures the Victorian sense of astonishment at these medical revelations, which promised not only to illuminate the mysterious workings of the human anatomy but to grant physicians access to the stirrings of the soul. Brain’s account considers how “scientific images of emotion” like pulse waves gave rise to late nineteenth-century psychological and aesthetic theories of empathy, a concept Robleto examines in his essay, “The First Time, the Heart (A Portrait of Life 1854–1913),” written to accompany a suite of prints of

early pulse-wave recordings. To Robleto, empathy is not merely a psychological or aesthetic response; it is a gift to be enacted by observers confronting the traces of departed souls, sketched in the cardiogram’s thin, quivering lines. Elizabeth Kathleen Mitchell gives such lines their due in her essay, “Dario Robleto’s Progress: The First Time, the Heart (A Portrait of Life 1854–1913), William Hogarth, and Line,” which situates Robleto’s pulse-wave portfolio alongside the work of the famed eighteenth-century English printmaker. Hogarth innovated the use of prints in series, in which he applied his theory of the “Line of Beauty” whereby serpentine contours convey the quality of liveliness and animation. Mitchell explicates Robleto’s shared interest in the life of line, paying attention to the ways both artists incorporate the direct influence of science and medicine through linear forms.

This volume’s second section, “Wavelengths,” concerns Robleto’s work with sound and image. For the multimedia installation The Pulse Armed With a Pen (An Unknown History of the Human Heartbeat) (see fig. 7.6), he collaborated with sound historian and preservationist Patrick Feaster to devise a method for sonically playing back pulse-wave tracings captured before the advent of acoustic recording technology. Digitally rendering graphic information as an intimate aural encounter, Feaster and Robleto invite listeners to hearken, as if through a stethoscope, to the pulse of distant lives. In “Voices, Hearts, and Playback,” Feaster describes the process of resurrecting these forgotten heartbeats, which can also be heard in Robleto’s video works The Boundary of Life Is Quietly Crossed (see figs. 6.4, 6.7–10, 6.16) and The Aorta of an Archivist (see figs. 6.13–15, 6.18, 6.19). Each of these videos offers extended meditations on episodes in the history of recording, from the first time human singing was captured via wax cylinder, in 1888, to the electrocardiographic (EKG) and electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings transcribed in the gold-plated grooves of a record sent into space aboard the Voyager space probe in 1977. One of Robleto’s most significant creative influences, the Voyager Golden Record represents another effort at universal communication, but it also bears the stamp of a specific time and place in human history. A roundtable in this section brings together Robleto, Roberts, musicologists Daniel K. L. Chua and Alexander Rehding, and anthropologist Stefan Helmreich to unpack the complexity and enduring fascination of the record from a range of disciplinary perspectives. The influence of the Golden Record’s architects, Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan, can be felt in both the content and the form of Robleto’s videos, which draw on creative techniques memorably used in Sagan’s landmark 1980 miniseries, Cosmos. My essay, “Dario Robleto’s Dissolving Views,” situates the spectacular strategies of Robleto’s videos within the history of illustrated scientific lectures, a lineage that reaches back past Cosmos to the magic lantern performances of the nineteenth century. Beyond their striking formal continuities, I argue for a deeper resonance between Robleto’s videos and the Victorian spectacles of science known as “dissolving views” — namely, their shared emphasis on the ephemerality and the fragility of life.

The book’s final section, “Horizons,” follows a speculative strain in Robleto’s practice, probing his interests in exobiology and his efforts to

expand the conversation around ethics and empathy in scientific fields. Inspired by his time as an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute, which is dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the cosmos, Robleto has embarked on a suite of dazzling sculptures framed as gifts to alien life-forms. In “More to Search Than Time Allows: Stillness and Wonder in Dario Robleto’s Gifts for Extraterrestrials,” cultural historian Elizabeth A. Kessler attends to the richness of material and historical signification embedded in these works, arguing that their astonishingly detailed arrangements of organic matter invite a patient and curious form of viewership. Historian of science Claire Isabel Webb explores the conditions of communication between human and nonhuman species implied by Robleto’s sculptures in “Reflexive Alienation: Pondering Cosmic Otherness with Dario Robleto.” What shared forms of sense perception and cognition do his works presume of our alien counterparts? What unique qualities do they reveal about us as humans and earthlings? Webb observes how these same questions have animated debates among SETI scientists since the institute’s founding. It follows that the book concludes with a reflection from Julius B. Lucks, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University and a key interlocutor during Robleto’s time as the artist-at-large at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering. Lucks’s essay demonstrates the ways that an attention to the aesthetic, ethical, and emotional questions underlying Robleto’s work can broaden the horizons of scientific inquiry, and he points to the impacts that such interdisciplinary partnerships can have in the classroom and the laboratory.

This book follows Robleto’s ever-expanding creativity across disciplinary boundaries, offering but one possible constellation of ideas, methodologies, and points of reference. It proposes that we find coherence not at the center of these spheres of research but at their edges, at their intersections. Or, perhaps, that we give up on coherence entirely, accepting that in the absence of a universal language, we must content ourselves with our mutual entanglement, however knotty it may be. That’s the nice thing about books — however diverse their contents, you can still count on their bindings to hold them together.

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1. Étienne- Jules Marey, La méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et principalement en physiologie et en médecine (Paris: G. Masson, 1878; 2nd ed., 1885), 111, quoted in Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman,

“Science since Babel: Graphs, Automatic Recording Devices, and the Universal Language of Instruments,” in Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 139.